Note to CIOs: It’s time to change the network

31 August 2018:

The network is something that not enough CIOs pay attention to. It’s often the IT resource that’s last on the priority list with the majority of focus given to applications.

That might have been fine 20 years ago when most applications and data lived on the user’s computers. Also, IT had extremely tight control of the endpoints and applications so user experience was easy to manage. Since then, the world has blown up (at least from an IT perspective) with applications moving to the cloud and being procured by lines of business and workers bringing their own endpoints in. What was once a tightly controlled, end to end ecosystem, is now totally chaotic.

Because we live in this highly interconnected world, the network plays an important role in how applications perform, which has a direct result on every businesses top and bottom line.

The network must change to be cloud optimized

The network now needs to change to this new world. The legacy architecture currently being used has many bottlenecks, particularly with the wide-area network (WAN), and creates application and security problems. This has given rise to many new technologies, such as software-defined WANs (SD-WANs), as a way of architecting a new type of network that is optimized for the cloud.